My ten year old self enjoyed the Wild C.A.T.s cartoon, it wasn't as good as X-men, but it was a fun time waster with an interesting scifi premise: Two alien races have been engaged in a shadow war for millennia, one defending mankind the other trying to dominate it. The villainous aliens have the ability to posses human hosts, the other team must recruit their allies from a pool of human/alien hybrids who have inherited special gifts.

The equivalent to X-men's Jubilee, the naive teen who serves as an audience surrogate was called Voodoo and she had the power to see, and exorcise the evil Daemonites.

What I didn't know when I was 10 was that in the comic books she was a stripper. The way this aspect of the character is handled in the original Image comics is worlds apart from how her DC Universe counterpart was treated.

Apartment renting. If you're lucky, you get to rent from a reasonable owner and share a building with people and animals who are halfway civilized. If you're not so lucky...you might just be New Yorkers Jane and Stephen from Alex Robinson's graphic novel Box Office Poison (Antarctic Press, 1996-2000; collected ed. Top Shelf, 2002). One page from Issue 4 (Mar 1997); eight pages from Issue 8 (Feb 1998).

By 1970, the underground comix field had come into its own as a creators' alternative to Comics Code restrictions on language, art and subject matter. This freer, "anything goes" environment was a positive development for comic books overall (otherwise I wouldn't be making all these posts about it). But it also had a darker side: an increased emphasis on content that was brutally degrading to women, and the exclusion of women creators from the most popular comix titles.

(A total of 17 pages are used, 4 from issue 1, 3 from issue 2, 6 from issue 3, and 4 from issue 4. For about 1/5th the total pages)

So a while back I found out about the comic Deathwish, part of the Milestone imprint for DC comics headed up by the late Dwayne McDuffie... the point of the imprint was to give a voice to people to tell their own experiences, particularly minority writers. As such it birthed many great PoC characters created by writers of the same background; it also gave birth to one of the only transgender Lesbian characters I know of Marissa Rahm.

The comic was created by Maddie Blaustein (credited here under her assigned name Adam Blaustein), an intersex woman who transitioned socially from male to female and championed Transgender rights. She is more well known for her voice work then her comics (I only found out about her comics from one that made a review on Atop the Fourth Wall which is how I managed to look up Deathwish), where she voiced many male and female characters notably Meowth for a good chunk of the Pokemon dub before her death. Blaustein`s writing is accompanied by early art of the amazing JH Williams III.

The story of Deathwish focuses on on Marissa a police officer who is investigating a series of serial killings of Trans women and drag queens in the city of Dakota, where the victims are made to pose in "artistic poses". Over the course of her investigation she transitioned socially, and fell in love with the only known survivor of one of the killer's, Boots', attacks. Also involved is Deathwish a vigilante who is basically Punisher: SVU, it is now four years later and things are quickly reaching their climax.

I`ve only included the pages that deal with Marissa and Dini`s relationship specifically but there`s huge spoilers involved for the story. As a note if you want to track this one down be aware that it is quite graphic and may be triggery.

This seems singularly apt. Though not a happy story, and indeed horrifying in more ways than I can articulate, it's a story about courage, and determination in the face of unimaginable opposition.

The piece is called Malala Yousafzai: I have the right. (Those of you familiar with the name will know that this is a story involving violence against a young woman, and bravery beyond measure, for those of you who aren't yet familiar with it, read on...)

Because this is a real person, I'm being cautious with the trigger warnings, and include them for bullying, child abuse, misogyny/sexism and violence towards women.

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